by Gordon Kerr
Persico is as tough as they come. Once, during the first Gallo Wars, when the brothers Joey and Larry Gallo were trying to take over the Colombo Family, of which Persico is a made member and currently head, he and an associate, Alphonse D’Ambrosio, were sitting in a car, minding their own business. Suddenly, a carful of Gallo loyalists drove by and opened fire on the car with a semi-automatic M-1 carbine. D’Ambrosio was hit in the chest and Persico took bullets in hand, shoulder and face. However, tough as old boots, Persico calmly spat the bullet out that had hit his face, started the engine and drove the car to the nearest hospital.
But you messed with The Snake at your peril. ‘Crazy’ Joe Gallo was gunned down in a clam restaurant in April 1972 as he celebrated his 43rd birthday. Persico is a suspect in that death as well as the death of ‘Crazy’ Joe’s brother Larry.
Born in 1937 in the Mafia’s top breeding ground of Brooklyn, Carmine Persico’s father was a soldier in the Genovese Family. Carmine was a chip off the old block and was known at first as ‘Junior’ in the streets of Brooklyn. As a teenager, he joined a gang known as The Garfield Boys, roaming the streets of the Red Hook district with a bunch of like-minded young thugs and hooligans. The Garfield Boys had terrorised Brooklyn since the early 20th century, only disappearing from the streets in 1971, and Persico soon became its leader.
He killed his first man at the age of 17 and with a witness known only as the Blue Angel identifying him as the shooter, it looked as if he would go to prison. However, before the Blue Angel’s testimony could be used to convict him, his older brother confessed to the murder. Taking the rap for his younger brother cost Alphonse dearly – 18 years in prison.
Persico became a made member of the Profaci Crime Family under Joe Profaci who reigned from 1928 to 1962. When Joe Colombo took over at the top, re-titling the Family in his name, Persico was promoted to capo. Meanwhile, his reputation as an enforcer and loan shark became fearsome on the streets of New York.
His team consisted of some of the most ruthless killers of the time – his brother, Alphonse, now out of jail, Gennaro ‘Jerry Lang’ Langella, Anthony Abbattermarco, Joey Brancatto and Hugh ‘Apples’ Mackintosh who, although not a made man due to his father not being Italian, was a hugely effective enforcer. A giant of a man who wore a size 52 suit, he was so valued that he became Carmine Persico’s bodyguard.
When Thomas ‘Old Man’ DiBella stepped down in 1977 as boss of the Colombo Family after five years at the helm, the Family descended into anarchy. The obvious choice as replacement was The Snake. He was the Family’s most powerful capo, but he had been pursued relentlessly by the authorities and served time in prison between 1973 and 1979 and then 1981 and 1984. Nevertheless, he held on to power, even behind bars, controlling Family affairs through his brother Alphonse and Langella. Those affairs consisted of narcotics-trafficking and labour racketeering.
When he was not in prison, Persico ran things from the Diplomat Social Club on the corner of 3rd Avenue and Carroll Street in the Van Brunt district of Brooklyn. This was where the top echelons of the Colombo Family could be found – his son, Ally, Langella, ‘Apples’ Mackintosh, Greg Scarpa, Carmine Franzese and Joe Colombo’s sons, Anthony, Vincent and Joe Jr. If you had business with the Colombo Family, that was where you went.
For years the US government had been wielding the Rico (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization) statutes against organised crime figures and in 1985 it was using them to remove leading New York Mafiosi from the scene. Persico had been out of jail for less than a year when, faced with racketeering charges, he went on the run. He was arrested in February 1985 in Wantagh, New York, but not before his name had been added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, the 390th fugitive to be listed.
A total of nine gangsters were being tried on racketeering charges in what became known as ‘The Commission Trial’. Persico, stupidly some thought, had studied law while in prison and decided to represent himself in the trial. His defence was that he should not be prosecuted just for being a member of Cosa Nostra. ‘Without the Mafia, there wouldn’t be no case here!’ he stormed at one point. But there was a case and a successful one at that. He was sentenced to 100 years in prison and would never be released.
However, he wanted to remain in control of the organisation, especially as he wanted his son, Alphonse, aka ‘Ally’, to take over from him when he was ready. Anyway, he had run things from prison before and did not see why he could not do so again. Victor ‘Little Vic’ Orena was chosen by Persico to deputise for him on the outside.
The trouble was that Orena enjoyed being top dog too much and wanted to do it full time. He lobbied Crime Commission members to remove Persico and make him head of the Family in his place and was supported in his efforts by the Dapper Don, John Gotti, head of the Gambino Family.
The Colombo Family inevitably split into warring factions, those who wanted Orena at the top and those who supported the status quo.
But, living up to his nickname, Persico struck quickly before the other side were ready.
In June 1991 Persico’s Consigliere, Carmine Sessa, led a five-man crew in an attack on Vic Orena’s home on Long Island. Sessa was a formidable hitman, with some 13 murders to his credit during his mobster career. This time it wasn’t to be, however. One of the team got nervous and let off a round before the other members of the team had taken up their positions. Orena was alerted to the danger and succeeded in making his escape.
Orena now sought help from the other Families and made fresh overtures to the Commission to have Persico removed as head of the Colombo Family. Sessa, on the other hand, petitioned on behalf of Persico, calling Orena a traitor and a usurper.
On 18 November 1991, Persico capo Greg Scarpo Sr. was driving his daughter and grand-daughter home. Cars pulled up around his vehicle and gunmen jumped out, guns drawn and ran towards him. Scarpo was fearless and hit the accelerator, driving off at speed and hitting anything that got in his way. As the bullets flew, some passers-by were injured, but Scarpa, one of the toughest men in the history of the Mafia, got away.
Five days later, Orena’s men were out in force again, led by William ‘Wild Bill’ Cutolo. They gunned down Persico man Henry ‘Hank the Bank’ Smurra outside a Brooklyn doughnut shop.
War broke out and 12 men lost their lives in it, Cutolo and Scarpo killing three men each. Two of the other victims were innocent bystanders, caught in the crossfire. Fifteen people were seriously wounded.
The last man to die was an Orena capo by the name of John Scopo. His killer was one of Greg Scarpa’s men – 18-year-old John Pappa. Pappa is a piece of work. He has the words ‘Morte prima di dishonore’ (Death before dishonour) tattooed across his back. He showed his belief in this motto when he shot dead his two accomplices in the Scopo hit because they took all the credit for it when he had been the actual hitman.
At the end of the two-year war, Persico claimed victory but it was a hollow one. The police had arrested Orena, who went to prison for life, effectively removing the threat to Persico, but numerous loyalists from both sides also went to jail. The Family emerged from the war, battered, bruised and weakened.
Persico has been incarcerated for the bulk of his time as leader of the Colombo Family and has become well used to using deputies to manage the day-to-day business while in prison. Recently, Persico’s cousin Andrew Russo and his son Allie have been running the Family. There is, currently, one slight problem though. Like Carmine Persico, both are behind bars, Allie in serious trouble and possibly facing the death penalty for his part in the murder of ‘Wild Bill’ Cutolo, a staunch Orena loyalist during the war. Cutolo had been made underboss by Allie as a peace gesture in 1999, but then suddenly disappeared on his way to a meeting with the boss.
The ‘street boss’ is now Thomas ‘Tommy Shots’ Gioeli, a loyal Persico ally during the war. Gioeli has suffered from chronic back problems for decades, but that did not stop him in his efforts to deal with Orena’s troops, even when, in March 1992, he was wounded in a car chas
e and shootout in Brooklyn. The last time he saw the inside of prison was in 1980, for robbery, and his strength lies, according to one source, ‘in his ability to bridge the gap between mobsters who were shooting at each other a decade ago’.
Meanwhile, Carmine ‘The Snake’ Persico, in the 22nd year of his incarceration, nods to a guard and sniffs the fresh air at Lompoc Federal Prison in California where he spends his time playing drums, riding the mechanical bull in the prison yard and tending his rose garden.
Anthony ‘The Ant’ Spilotro
It wasn’t much of a crime. A T-shirt worth a couple of dollars from a low-rent shop in the neighbourhood. It was 1955 and the law was making acquaintance with Anthony ‘the Ant’ Spilotro, by slapping a $10 dollar fine on him and sticking him on probation. It would be a long and varied relationship, though. He and the law would be rubbing up against each other for years to come.
Spilotro was born and raised in Chicago, the fourth of the six sons of Pasquale and Antoinette Spilotro who ran Patsy’s Restaurant, an establishment renowned for its meatballs, which were a magnet for business from all over town. Patsy’s was also a haunt of big-time gangsters such as Sam Giancana, Jackie Cerone, Gussie Alex and Frank Nitti. It is reported that the Mob would convene meetings in the restaurant’s car park.
Five of the Spilotro brothers – John, Vincent, Victor, Michael and Tony liked what they saw when the hoods swaggered into Patsy’s in their expensive suits, smoking fat cigars, and became involved in petty crime at an early age. The sixth brother, Pasquale, chose a different path, becoming one of Chicago’s most highly respected oral surgeons. At school, Anthony was a bully and he dropped out of High School at the age of 15, turning his attention to petty theft and mugging. He was arrested no fewer than 12 times in the next five years. In the ensuing years he would be given the nickname, ‘Tony the Ant’ by the press, after FBI agent William Roemer referred to him as ‘that little pissant’.
In the course of his activities, the young Spilotro befriended Vincent ‘the Saint’ Inserro, a crook with Mob connections, and soon he was mixing with the cream of the Chicago underworld, hanging out with figures like Joseph Aiuppa, Jimmy ‘the Turk’ Torrello, Joey ‘the Clown’ Lombardo and William Daddano Sr., most of whom would climb through the Mafia ranks in the coming years.
His mentor in the Mob was a bit special, however. ‘Mad’ Sam DeStefano was one of the Chicago outfit’s most notorious hitmen, considered by some in the CIA to be the worst torture-murderer in the history of the United States. It was a lethal pairing, a mentally unstable sadistic killer and a ruthless young criminal on the make.
Spilotro did well in his first few years, moving quickly through the ranks, and in 1962 was entrusted with his first hit. He was contracted along with ‘Mad’ Sam and a couple of others to take care of those responsible for robbing and killing Ron and Phil Scalvo, Mob associates, after a bar-room fight. To make matters worse, the murder was carried out in Elmwood Park, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Chicago where a number of the members of the Chicago operation had their homes. This made Elmwood strictly off-limits for Chicago’s criminals as the last thing the mobsters wanted was to draw police attention to the area in which they lived. Bill McCarthy and Jimmy Miraglia, a couple of small-time crooks, were known to have been responsible and they had the added misfortune to be in debt to DeStefano. Miraglia immediately went into hiding, but McCarthy was captured and taken to the basement of ‘Mad’ Sam’s house where he was tortured in an effort to get him to spill the beans on his accomplice. At one point, to hurry matters along a little, Spilotro put McCarthy’s head in a vice and began to tighten it. He tightened it so much that McCarthy’s eye popped out of its socket. Needless to say, McCarthy began to talk.
A few days later, the bodies of the two men were found in the boot of a car, badly beaten, with their throats slit ear to ear. Spilotro’s stock rose in the circles in which he moved and in 1963 he became a made member of the Mafia, working for Felix ‘Milwaukee Phil’ Alderiso, an underboss for Mafia Godfather Sam Giancana.
When a former associate of ‘Mad’ Sam DeStafano, Charles ‘Chuckie’ Crimaldi, became an informer for the FBI, he gave evidence against Spilotro and DeStefano at their trial for the murder of an estate agent, Leo Foreman, who had made the mistake of throwing Sam DeStefano out of his office in May 1963. Foreman had been lured to the home of Sam's brother, Mario, to play cards and, before being shot, was tortured, stabbed countless times with an ice-pick, and had pieces of his flesh cut out while he was still alive.
Nonetheless, they were both acquitted.
Spilotro was given responsibility for a large bookmaking territory and did so well in his first year that he was sent to Miami to provide protection for sports handicapper Frank Rosenthal, the man on whose career Martin Scorsese’s film Casino was based. (Joe Pesci played Nicky Santoro, the Spilotro character.)
The year 1967 saw Spilotro back in Chicago, but in 1971 he landed a big job when he was sent to Las Vegas to replace Marshall Caifano as overseer of the Mob-controlled casinos there, setting up his office in the gift shop of the Circus Circus casino. It was handy having a desert nearby as that is where several of the people he tortured and murdered during this period ended up. In fact, immediately following his arrival in Vegas, the murder rate increased by 70 per cent.
Spilotro’s job here was to manage the ‘skim’ operation that brought millions of dollars to the Mob every year. He oversaw the employees of the casinos who were embezzling money and ensured that it made its way back to the Mob in the mid-west.
In 1972, ‘Mad’ Sam was living up to his reputation, behaving bizarrely and drawing attention to himself and his associates in his various trials. It was decided to eliminate him and Spilotro was selected to make the hit. He shot Sam twice with a shotgun in the garage of his Northwest Side home, fatally wounding him. ‘Mad’ Sam’s brother, Mario, was convicted of complicity in the murder and was a sentence of 20 to 40 years in prison. Amazingly, Spilotro walked again.
In late 1974, the manager of the International Fiber Glass Company Danny Siefert, was to be a principal witness in a fraud case involving Joey ‘the Clown’ Lombardo, later to become head of the Chicago Mafia, and insurance agent Allen Dorfman. These two men were accused of syphoning off $1.4 million from the Teamsters Union pension fund. But Siefert never had his day in court; he was shot in front of his wife and four-year-old son in September 1974 by Anthony Spilotro and, needless to say, he got away with this one, too.
In 1975, Allen Glick, front man for the Mafia-controlled Stardust and Fremont Hotel and Casinos in Vegas, was having problems with wealthy real estate owner and investor Tamara Rand, over a $2 million loan she had made to him. Rand claimed to have been threatened in May of that year after filing suit against him, although she never made clear by whom. To make matters worse, a couple of months previously she had also filed criminal fraud charges against Glick. Glick complained to Mafia boss Joe Aiuppa about Rand and in November of that year she was shot dead in the kitchen of her home in Mission Hill, San Diego by Tony Spilotro with the help of Frank ‘Bomp’ Bompensiero, another well-known Mafia hitman.
Shortly afterwards, it was Bompensiero’s turn. Consigliere of the Californian Cosa Nostra – known as the ‘Mickey Mouse Mafia‘ – ‘Bomp’ was believed to be an FBI informant and was becoming something of an embarrassment. He was shot to death at close range with a silenced .22 calibre handgun while standing in a phone booth in San Diego. The killer? Anthony Spilotro, of course.
The biggest hit of Spilotro’s illustrious career, if indeed he did it, involved the Godfather himself. Sam Giancana had been head of the Chicago Mafia for ten years, from 1956 to 1966. But he had become unpopular due to his lavish lifestyle and his refusal to cut underlings into the profits of his highly lucrative gambling operations in Iran and South America. ‘Momo’, as he was known, was eventually deposed and went into exile in Mexico. A few years later, however, he was arrested by the Mexican authorities and deported back t
o the United States.
Not long after his return, in June 1975, Momo was frying Italian sausages and peppers in the basement of his home in Oak Park, Illinois, when he was shot in the back of the head. When he fell to the floor, the body was turned over and shot a further six times in the face, just to be sure. The assassin had to be someone that Giancana knew well for him to be in such close proximity to his victim. It is believed to have been Anthony Spilotro working under the orders of the new boss of the Chicago Mafia, Joey Aiuppa.
In 1976, Spilotro opened The Gold Rush Ltd with his brother Michael and Chicago bookmaker Herbert ‘Fat Herbie’ Blitzstein. The Gold Rush, located one block from The Strip, purported to be a combination jewellery store and ‘electronics factory’, but was mainly a place for the trio to fence stolen goods. It became the HQ of a gang Spilotro put together with his boyhood friend Frank Culotta, which became known as the Hole in the Wall Gang, due to their habit of stealing jewellery from stores by drilling a hole in the wall. The gang consisted of Spilotro, his brother Michael, Samuel and Joseph Cusumano, Ernesto ‘Ernie’ Davino, Lawrence ‘Crazy Larry’ Neumann, Wayne Matecki, Salvatore ‘Sonny’ Romano, Leonardo ‘Leo’ Guardino, Frank Culotta, Herbert ‘Fat Herbie’ Blitzstein and former Las Vegas detective Joseph Blasko. Culotta, Blasko, Guardino, Neumann and Matecki were all arrested while carrying out a robbery on Bertha’s Household Products in July 1982.
Another of Spilotro’s hits was brutal in the extreme. William ‘Action’ Jackson worked as a loan-shark enforcer for Sam DeStefano. Following his indictment on a hijacking charge, he was seen with FBI agents in a Milwaukee restaurant and DeStefano surmised that he had cut a deal with the FBI in return for a lighter sentence. Spilotro was enlisted to deal with Jackson and he abducted him, driving him to a meat-packing plant in Chicago. There, he hung him by a meat-hook which had been inserted in his rectum. Spilotro tortured him further by smashing both his knees with a hammer and prodding his genitals with an electric cattle prod. Jackson was left to die and it took him three days.
